


Have Spacesuit

by seekingferret



Category: Kill Your Heroes - AWOLNATION (Song)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-11
Updated: 2014-06-11
Packaged: 2018-02-04 05:34:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,114
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1767364
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/seekingferret/pseuds/seekingferret
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It began six months earlier. Our whole crew was working as freelance astrologers in Tampa, hacking into NASA satellites to get the inside scoop on the cosmological phenomena that really predicted the future. It wasn't the most glamorous work, but the money was fantastic.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Have Spacesuit

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Ghostie](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ghostie/gifts).



We move in one at a time, watching each others' backs. Richard waits outside the gate in a van, monitoring us from surveillance cameras he should not have access to. Some of us are graceful and silent, the way we practiced. Others barely get the moves right despite the drills. Karen nearly trips on a poorly placed water cooler. Poorly placed for her purposes. I'm not trained as an interior decorator like Selim, but I would imagine it was placed well to serve as a water cooler. 

I click my comm and check our status with Richard.

"Zero heroes in target area. Repeat, zero heroes in target area." 

"Copy that." I breathe a sigh of relief. I'd been afraid we'd have to kill our heroes to get in.

\---

It began six months earlier. Our whole crew was working as freelance astrologers in Tampa, hacking into NASA satellites to get the inside scoop on the cosmological phenomena that really predicted the future. Unlike those hacks using ancient Zodiac charts, our horoscopes were backed by genuine science, or at least that's what we told our clients. It wasn't the most glamorous work, but the money was fantastic. For the first time in a decade I was dreaming of actually getting together enough to pay off my student loans and get the hell out of the shadow economy. 

Mostly the work was pretty routine. Richard was a pretty decent hacker, but the backdoors he was using to grab the data had been put in by NASA contractors for precisely these purposes when the systems were built, so probably even Galina or I could have done it if we didn't have a real blackhatter on the team. I worked the seer algorithms along with Karen, who'd been a physics postdoc at Baylor until she lost her fellowship. Galina and Selim took our data analysis and wrote the reports that we sent to our clients, explaining how the recent burst of gamma radiation from Messier 69 portended a rise in the NASDAQ index. Polo did our accounting. We paid all our taxes, on time and fully documented in case of audit. "We're not going down like Capone" was a team mantra, along with "The truth is in the stars."

That all changed the day Richard came to us with a problem.

"Well, it's not really a problem." he said. "Lest anyone panic, let me be clear that this is not threatening our data. We still have full access to satellites Gamma Echo 3, Brutus 4, Novastars 1, 4, and 7, and Hubble 2, and all I had to do was reroute around a new firewall on an ancillary server. Whatever the reasons driving these new security upgrades, they're definitely not about locking us out of the backdoors. But NASA clearly has some data it thinks requires more security than usual, and it looks like we just happened to get hit lightly as collateral damage."

Everyone looked at me. We are, in loving homage to our favorite movie, organized as an anarcho-syndicalist commune, but when things get tricky I am usually our best planner. I looked at Richard's face. He was smiling and waiting like everyone else. He did not seem particularly concerned, and Richard was not very good at hiding his fears.

"We need more information about this to determine how it affects our business model," I said after thinking it through for a moment. "Odds are, it's no big deal. Maybe the folk at SETI are nosing around for the Roswell data again and somebody got antsy. This is probably not how they would do it if they were trying to sniff us out, but it doesn't hurt to check in with Galina's friends at the FBI to make sure we're still under their radar. We need to figure out if the new firewalls are the extent, or if they're just the first step. If things get really heavy, we could get locked out even if they're not targeting us, so if there is a plan to roll out more security we need to get a copy of it."

"I'll call Sammy today," Galina said, blushing.

"I'll try hacking their server for the new data security plans," Richard said.

"I'll find out what's going on," Polo said, and though Galina and Richard both dutifully attempted their respective tasks, it was indeed Polo who came back to us two days later with the answers we were looking for. Polo knew people.

"So, like, the bottom line is we're fucked, dudes," was his concise summary of the situation. "Business plan being ruined is the least of our worries. NASA's been recording weird shit in the sky for weeks. All the terrible chemicals we've been dumping into the atmosphere have hit some sort of critical mass and started precipitating out in massive lumps of floating toxic waste. They're telling people it's just another freak ecological disaster, over in a day, but it's the end. Earth's doomed. Everyone's going to be dead within a month." He had a bottle of Stoli in each fist as he told us this, and was taking alternate sips from each bottle in between sentences. This was a little unusual for Polo. He usually only drank one bottle of vodka at a time.

We were silent as we processed the news of our imminent demise. Then, everyone looked at me. 

"The first thing we're going to need is a lot more vodka," I said. "Then we're going to need a plan."

\---

I disable the motion sensor with a funky blue mimetic foam Karen made and stand back to let Selim pick the lock. Galina and Polo cover us with tranq guns, but as Richard predicted there's nobody to interrupt us. They all must be too busy doing other things in other places. Given what's happening, I can't really blame them. If I knew the world was about to end, I wouldn't spend any time on new fuel research. Especially if I hadn't yet figured out that the new fuel was just the thing to save a few of us from the end.

I slip into the locked room and examine its contents with pleasure. "Jackpot," I whisper, but too loud. Richard hears me over the comm.

"That's it, then? It's there?"

"Yes, Richard." I sigh. "It's there. Now stay off the damned comms unless we need you." Some anarcho-syndicalist commune we've turned out to be. By this point I'm clearly the one giving orders.

On the side of the room, in three sealed vats about the size of a beer keg, are three formulations of the superfuel MRF-12. Any one of those kegs has enough power for what we need. I almost can't resist the urge to whisper jackpot again, as Selim and I load the vats onto a cart to haul out.

\--

"Well, I, for one, don't intend to die with the rest of the plebes," Polo said, his words slurring heavily. He had a considerable head start on the rest of us, both in the drinking and the thinking about the news. It would take the rest of us another hour to get drunk enough to realize we all agreed with him. Dying in a lot with the rest of humanity was for the squares. We were way too cool for that.

"If we don't figure out a way to survive the end, I'm drinking the kool aid," Galina said. We all agreed to this, too. It's strange, though. I've always said "Never let your fear decide your fate," but here we were and our fear did a better job of motivating us than any other motivator I've ever had. Our backs, and the backs of everyone we cared about, were against the wall, and that was when our creativity finally shone.

"It's only Earth that's going to be destroyed, right, Polo?" Karen asked. "Mars doesn't have any of the weird shit in the sky?"

"No," Polo confirmed. "It's apparently a by-product of our pollution. Mars doesn't have any pollution, so it's clean."

"So all of the heroes are going to jump in their rocketships and blast away from the problem, neh?" For ages now, Hero was our word for the NASA boffins whose work we were resentfully dependent on as all parasites must be resentful of their productive host. We were the Zeroes, if we ever gave a name to ourselves. "There's zero gravity in the astral realm," as Selim had once explained to a customer who'd overheard him using the in-group slang. 

Polo snorted another shot of vodka down his gullet. He chased it with a hoarse and ironic laugh. "No, that's the funniest part. NASA's completely flummoxed. They don't have any rockets with enough range to get them anywhere useful. They can send a handful of people up to ISS, but at full capacity ISS can only survive a couple years without supplies from down the gravity well. And what do those poor lucky sobs who survive the end of the world DO up there? It's not like they'll be able to work on fixing the problems with the atmosphere from the ISS. Unofficial word from the president is to prep every rocket in existence for takeoff, and then sit on them, waiting for someone to figure out how to actually use them."

Galina crowed. "But that's too perfect," she said. "They're going to roll the rockets out onto the pads in a futile gesture of shaking their fist at the universe. When the answer to all their problems is sitting not a thousand yards from the pad."

"What're you talking about?" Selim asked.

"I keep an eye on the research at NASA, okay? They've got a team in Delta Seventeen that's developed a super-energy-dense fuel. Three liters is enough to lift a rocket out of the gravity well and all the way to Mars." If Galina said it was real, it probably was. Galina's academic training was the most perplexing of any of us zeroes. Her resume was terribly unimpressive, which was the reason she'd never landed a job outside the shadow economy. Over the course of her six years matriculation at the University of Oklahoma, she'd been registered in eleven different majors, but had never amassed enough credits to complete any of them. You could call her flighty, but she preferred to call herself a generalist in an age of specialists. Galina didn't actually know anything, but she knew about everything.

It came in very handy on pub trivia night.

"Even supposing that's true, they can't exactly just toss it into a fuel tank designed to carry RP-1, can they?" Karen objected. "There must be a hundred design differences for the fuel delivery system, optimistically speaking, and making those changes takes time."

I didn't follow the rest of the conversation, but after a while Galina managed to satisfy Karen that no, those changes wouldn't require time. There's something very humbling about listening to people talk over your head for twenty minutes. It makes you rethink a lot of choices you made. Apparently there was a vat of fuel sitting in Canaveral that you could just dump into a rocket and fly away and in the panic of the moment nobody had realized what it could do. 

"So if we were able to get the fuel and access to a rocket, we could get the hell off this dying planet?" Polo asked. "Wave goodbye to all those suckers and be on our merry way? Fucking yeah. Let's do it." 

Easier said than done.

\---

"Shift change," Karen says into her comm, and everyone acknowledges in sequence. From this moment, we have seven minutes and fourteen seconds to get from the gate to JADE's hatch, according to Karen's watch. No, we haven't timed it down to the second. There are too many variables to be sure our plan is that perfect. We probably have between nine and thirteen minutes, depending on whether Joe the night guard spills his coffee and needs to pour himself a new cup before heading to his station. Seven minutes and fourteen seconds is just Karen's sense of humor. She watches too many action movies. 

The day gate guard, who I think I remember from the briefing is named Maurice, leaves his post and jumps in his golf cart to ride back to his car. As usual it is six minutes past the time when Joe was supposed to show up to relieve him, and Maurice has gotten tired of waiting. It's a strange sort of mental combat that goes on between Maurice and Joe. Maurice, or maybe his name was Mitchell, would be justified in being indignant, except that he usually shows up at six thirty AM for his six AM shifts himself. Joe knows this, and Mitchell knows that if he reports Joe for being late, Joe will just tag him for the same offense. Locked in their guilty stalemate, they have left us a tiny window to blow past security.

Karen had dared herself to reconstruct a 3D printed gate key based only on telephoto zoomed images of the key, but in its single moment in the sun, the key fails to move the third tumbler, so Selim shoves her aside and picks the lock with a bump key. The clock is down to six minutes and forty seconds when we slam the gate behind us and take off for the launchpad. Galina is driving like the Russian maniac that she is. I am holding on for dear life. Karen is holding onto Richard for dear life. At this pace, we should have the time to take a cigarette break at the launchpad before Joe the gate guard shows up.

\---

NASA didn't know what to do with their rockets, but that didn't mean they were leaving them unguarded. Richard and I pushed our backdoor access to the limits making a list of all of the rockets that were on the launchpads at Canaveral. Most of them were satellite launchers, without the life support equipment we would need for our journey to the stars. There were a handful of ships with barely enough capacity to ferry a couple of heroes to LEO. And there were two experimental next-generation vehicles that could handle the long haul to Mars. Those were our targets.

MIRA-I was the famously photogenic star of Time Magazine covers and Playboy spreads, so of course we looked at it first. If you're going to steal a spaceship and jet away from a dying Earth, you ought to do it in a truly sweet ride. What we discovered, underneath some serious firewalls, was dismaying. It turns out that those sweet, sweet curves weren't actually all that aerodynamic. MIRA-1 was a boondoggle, billions of dollars spent to create a media star and give jobs to underemployed aerospace workers. If you actually tried to take it out of the atmosphere, there was a thirty percent chance it would rip apart in the stratosphere's crosscurrents, according to one of the classified reports we found. Another report said the true risk was closer to sixty percent. The reason MIRA-1 had been the subject of so many Popular Science stories was because none of the heroes would set foot inside it. When Polo asked around, he found that a lot of them thought that poor MIRA-1 was cursed. 

A thirty percent chance of surviving was still a better roll of the dice than no chance at all, so we sent Selim to see if the security presence around MIRA-1 befitted its status as an oversized paperweight. He spent a day casing the pad, checking the rotation of the guards, looking for lapses we could exploit. He came back empty-handed. They were guarding the thing, he said, like it were Fort Knox. Galina said that was fitting, since Fort Knox didn't have any treasure in it anymore, anyway. We took her word for it. 

That meant our only option was MIRA-1's frumpy, workaday cousin JADE. It was smaller and looked like a school bus with wings, but the aerodynamic profile data we found showed that it would not break up in the atmosphere, and the rest of its engineering was attested in its documentation with the precision that speaks of reliable, careful work. It would get us to Mars, all right. And though its security was also tight, there were some exploitable vulnerabilities that we could work our way through if we were clever. There was only one problem with JADE. JADE only had room for five passengers. 

\--

There are two heroes standing right on the launchpad, inspecting JADE's extruder valves no doubt, but we take them out easily with a pair of tranquilizer darts. They slump to the ground as Karen's clock ticks down below two minutes. 

"We're actually here," Richard says, and nobody chides him for clogging the comms with his chatter because we're all taking a moment to think the same thing. By the latest internal NASA estimate, everyone on Earth will be dead within the next seven days, and we are standing here about to write ourselves into whatever comes after history is over. 

"Time for the lottery," I say, a little amazed that I can even speak. I pull six ping pong balls out of my pack and present them with a showman's flourish to the rest of the Zeroes. Each one has one of our names on it, as they all acknowledge. Not that any of us would rig this game. We've been through too much together. 

I put the balls back into my pack and invite Richard to pull the first ball. "Galina," he says. She looks somber and expressionless, like she can't figure out how to feel. I can't blame her. She pulls the second ball out. Selim. The third ball is Richard. I look at Karen and Polo and read the anxiety in their eyes. It mirrors my own. I don't want to die, but I want Karen and Polo to die even less. The reason for the lottery is because without it, every one of us would volunteer to be one to stay home. In a way, that is the most terrifying thing of all. How did I find this family who would die for me? What did I do to deserve them?

Karen slips her hand into Richard's. He gives her a soft squeeze that he no doubt intends to reassure her. Polo's hand tenses around a bottle of vodka that I could swear I forbade him to carry in here. Our old anarcho-syndicalist roots coming through, no doubt. I squeeze my hands on the pack that I'm holding, with three ping pong balls left. Two of the balls click softly against each other.

Richard pulls out the fourth ball with his right, keeping a tight grip on Karen with his left. It's Polo. The bottle slips out of his hand, drops to the ground. Somehow it doesn't break, but the scraping, screeching sound of glass on concrete jars something loose inside us. Polo starts bawling, out of relief, perhaps, or maybe sadness. We forget about the last two ping pong balls, forget about NASA security, forget about the end of the world, and all six of us grab each other in a group hug. It is the first time I can remember us doing this. It may be the first time I have ever hugged Polo, for that matter. I don't want it to stop.

We extricate ourselves from the hug and move to neutral corners, like we need to distance ourselves from what just happened. Polo retrieves his vodka bottle and dries his tears before plucking the fifth ping pong ball out of my pack. He takes a quick look at it and then he turns and flings it as far as he can in the opposite direction. The tears return and he wraps me in a bear hug. His vodka bottle is cold against my back. Somehow, I am not crying. Somehow it has come out exactly as I expected it would.

"We'll never forget you, man," he says, loud enough for everyone to hear. "One in six is really shitty odds," he whispers into my ear. "This whole thing is bullshit." But it isn't. My whole team, all of my zeroes, the five best people I know, are going off to colonize the stars and give humanity a second chance. There's nothing at all that is bullshit about that. 

Karen and Richard are hugging each other and weeping, too. Polo lets go of me and offers me a sip of his... no, he's offering me the whole bottle. 

"I was never going to take it with me," he explains. "You ordered me not to."

\---

It became apparent pretty quickly that being organized as an anarcho-syndicalist commune might work when we all had clearly defined roles that satisfied us, but it wouldn't work for this job. When we needed someone to perform an unpopular task, there had to be someone who could make someone do it and have it stick. Somebody needed to be in charge. 

I nominated Galina, because I thought her breadth of knowledge would help her make the right choices and her fierce Russian demeanor would make the rest of us respect her. But I was shouted down pretty quickly by the rest of the crew. They wanted me to run the show, and I reluctantly accepted. Of course, we couldn't make it that easy. Despite the predetermined outcome, we had an election, campaigns and all. Polo's campaign speech was cribbed from the Marx Brothers. It left us screaming with laughter. Selim did "We few, we happy few, we band of brothers," with a couple of choice ad-libs. Karen pretended she was the incumbent and pointed to her long record of fictitious achievements in the role of leader. If I hadn't known that none of them were real, I would have voted for her. My own speech was simple: I don't want the job, so vote for someone else. Then we cast the ballots and I won, unanimously. 

I would be lying if I said that from that point on, they followed my instructions without question. There were a lot of arguments, and there was a lot of working behind my back to do things I explicitly told them not to, but that was all part of the game. We were a team, but only by accident. When the chips were down, we'd band together and get things done. Probably. 

\---

While Karen pours the miracle fuel into JADE's tank, I help the rest of my team strap in. Real heroes spend years learning how every part of their vessel works before strapping in. We are barely sure we're using the seatbelts correctly. We have no clue what most of the buttons on this thing do. Fortunately NASA has written a hell of a manual, and they'll have plenty of time to read it while the Earth dies. Maybe someday they'll actually know how to use every part of the ship that is their salvation. It honestly seems a little unlikely.

Karen arrives in the crew pod and I strap her in, too, and then it's time to get the hell out of the way. We're not sure what a safe distance from this rocket launch will be, between the experimental fuel and our complete lack of familiarity with JADE's operation. Then again, I'm not sure I want to survive the launch. Within a few weeks the Earth's atmosphere will be so toxic that there will be no avoiding its deadly miasma. And all of my family will be millions of miles away, above it all. It might be easier if I stay on the launchpad and let the flame wash over me. I have no future down here.

\---

In retrospect it was amazing that the procreation conversation hadn't taken place sooner. I'm sure we were all thinking about it. I know I was. But we avoided it, because that's who we were. We avoided responsibility for anything bigger than our immediate needs. Until Karen and Richard started hooking up and Polo asked if they were using protection, and suddenly it was out in the open.

It was the biggest fight we had in our whole time as a team. Galina wanted all the men to get vasectomies. Polo thought we should put the women on chemical birth control. Selim believed that if we were the only survivors of Earth, we had an obligation to do what we could to continue the lineage of humanity.

Richard thought that was bullshit. "Look," he said, a sneer visible on his face. "If we were serious about saving the lineage of humanity, we'd all give up our places on the JADE. We'd kidnap five brilliant female scientists like, I don't know, maybe Carolyn Bertozzi and Vicki Tolvin, and shove them into space with a bucket of frozen sperm. We're not doing this for the good of humanity. We're stealing JADE because we're too selfish to die with the rest of the groundpounders."

"Fuck off," Selim said. "I'm doing this because we have an idea of how to save a few people while NASA is too busy panicking to realize what resources they have under their noses. That doesn't mean I'm disclaiming all morality. Do you really want ten thousand years of human heritage to die when the five of us run out time, when we have a chance to kickstart a new generation? I can't believe I'm even arguing this with you. You have no semblance of human compassion, Richard." He stormed out of the room. 

Karen sided with Richard, at least publicly, but I noticed the next day that she quietly added an electronic copy of Dr. Spock to the files to load onto JADE's hard drive, mislabelled as the adventures of Mr. Spock. And Galina and Polo didn't complain when I removed condoms from the cargo manifest two weeks later as part of a pass of weight-saving cuts in our cargo. Something Selim said must have gotten through to them, but I was afraid to ask what it was because I didn't want the fight to heat up again. 

\---

JADE is thick, silvery, and phallic on the launchpad. Ugly step-child no more; I can think of no more beautiful sight in the world. When our seven are minutes up, the NASA security teams start to converge on the launchpad, but it's too late. The launch sequence has initiated and Richard's worm keeps them out of the control room where they could execute a manual override. Oh, eventually they'll beat the door down, but we've calculated how long it'll take them to think of that, and the JADE should be in the stratosphere before that happens. 

And me? I had planned to watch the launch, but as soon as the launch sequence is started I beat it off Canaveral like there's a demon chasing me. Five demons, maybe. I park outside the first bar I can find off the cape, one of those trashy astro-bars where wannabes go to fuck would-be heroes. I carry Polo's bottle in with me, even though I have no intention of drinking it tonight. I'm saving it for the end. 

I grab a stool at the middle of the bar. There's a group of teenagers doing tequila shots to my left, and an old toothless drug fiend to my right drinking a Miller Lite from the can. I tell the bartender I want to get drunk and cheaply, quickly, and unpleasantly as possible and he says there's been a lot of that going around. He's happy to oblige, or maybe that's not the right word for it. He seems to take satisfaction in doing his job well, serving people in need. I wonder what it's like, not knowing that our species maybe only has a few weeks left until the atmosphere becomes irredeemably toxic. I wonder what it's like with that secret looming over your head without your knowledge. 

I get spectacularly drunk. Kissing Kyle the drug fiend drunk. Pissing on the street drunk. Sleeping on trash in an alley drunk. Letting strangers draw smiley faces up and down my arms in permanent marker drunk. I get so drunk that I am not yet hungover the next night when I return to the same bar and greet the same bartender with the same request, still buzzed. 

A pretty man sidles up to me the second night and between the alcohol and his charms he manages to break through my barriers and get me to talk. I don't tell him about the end of the world, but I tell him about how I just sent my only friends and family in the whole world away, never to return. He listens and seems sympathetic and understanding, or maybe just cute and innocent. He tells me about friends he's had to say goodbye to, and I try to listen, but mostly I just stare into his deep green eyes and think about JADE and the future of mankind. When I've had enough to drink, we go home together to his beachfront apartment, but we don't have sex. I just lie on his couch in his arms and we fall asleep like that, both trying to hold off drunken tears. 

When I wake up his arms are still wrapped tightly around my shoulders and I have to struggle to get out of his sleeping grasp. I find my bag where I left it by the door to his apartment. It contains more or less my only possessions in the world, or at least the only ones I care about. I shower and change into clean clothes before returning to the main room. He is still asleep on the couch. I kiss him softly on the forehead and slip out of his apartment onto the beach. The wind is whipping fiercely through the dune grass. I am probably imagining its greenish-yellow tint. 

I pull Polo's bottle out of my bag and empty its contents into the ocean. I am definitely imagining Polo's fierce voice yelling at me for wasting good alcohol, but I am nonetheless certain it would be exactly what he would say if he were here. But he isn't, and so I keep pouring, drops of vodka in an ocean, until the bottle is an empty vessel. 

It is a foolish, meaningless gesture, yet it fills me up with a depth of feeling I cannot recall experiencing before. In a few days, greenish-yellow tint or not, it will all be over, and I am not afraid.


End file.
